I try to architect my application objects in such a way that the scope is natural, but it never fails, if the app has any complexity at all, I end up needing to fudge some things here and there. The way I've solved the problem described by safewolf is to create the reference I need upon object instantiation.

You can add whatever custom properties you want to any object. In the example, below, the current object scope (this) is what I know I'll want to access later in my validator function. Instead of 'this', you could put any object you want to access later.

Code:

...
name: 'myTextfield',
parentScope: this,
width: 200,
...

Then, for example, when my field validator function is called and 'this' is the textfield, I can do something like this: